The governing arrangements that made New Orleans a darling of education reformers will soon be a thing of the past. Is this the beginning of the end of the nation’s most promising experiment in non-traditional education governanace?

Education Next’s Paul E. Peterson and Martin West talk about what education reforms they expect from President-Elect Donald Trump. Will he move on school choice, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, Title I portability, charter schools, or something entirely unexpected?

Teachers can now access a wealth of free resources online—from one image to a whole curriculum. But the growing reliance on open educational resources raises questions—who will produce them, how will they be compensated, how will educators be able to find the best ones, and how will all this affect the market for textbooks?

There’s plenty of evidence that students attending “no excuses” charter schools can do extremely well on standardized tests, but do the benefits of this approach to education extend beyond test scores?

What voters decide on November 8 will matter for education policy in general and school choice especially. Will federal support for charter schools continue? Will charter schooling remain a bipartisan issue? Who will win the battle over lifting the charter cap in Massachusetts?

When Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, he launched several new programs to boost student achievement in New York City schools. Has he succeeded in crafting a progressive alternative to predecessor Michael Bloomberg’s “education reform” agenda?

Should teachers be paid more? Should it be harder for teachers to get tenure? Are teacher evaluation systems working?

In this episode of the EdNext podcast, Paul E. Peterson and Martin West take a close look at the differing views of teachers, parents, and the general public on polices that affect teachers, based on data from 2016 EdNext survey.

The just-released 2016 Education Next poll identified changes in public support for the Common Core, testing, opting out, and school choice. Paul Peterson and Marty West discuss what the public says it wants and why these opinions are changing.

Using inexpensive new technology, students can take virtual reality field trips without leaving their classrooms. What will schools, teachers, and curriculum developers need to do for virtual reality to live up to the hype? In this episode of the EdNext podcast, Marty West talks with Michael Horn, whose article, “Virtual Reality Disruption: Will 3-D technology break through to the educational mainstream?” appears in the Fall 2016 issue of Education Next.

It is widely believed that minority students are overrepresented in special ed programs, possibly due to racial bias. But controlling for other factors that might put students at risk for problems at school, Paul Morgan and George Farkas find that minority students are actually less likely to receive special ed services than similarly situated white students.

The Common Core standards initiative was launched in 2009 but by the time new tests aligned with those standards were rolled out 4 to 5 years later, there was mounting opposition to using those tests to evaluate teachers and schools. To preserve support for the standards, many states began throwing the assessments overboard. Will abandoning the tests in order to save the standards actually work?

Los Angeles has over 41,000 students on charter school wait lists. But when the school district and teachers union got wind of the Broad Foundation’s plan to help launch schools to serve those students, simmering tensions over charter school expansion exploded.

At least ten percent of students who graduate from high school and plan on going to college never show up on campus in the fall, a phenomenon called “summer melt.” Ben Castleman of the University of Virginia has studied the causes of summer melt and is testing some innovative interventions to help get at-risk students to college.

Stanford University’s Terry M. Moe sits down with EdNext editor Marty West to discuss how political debates over education reform have unfolded around the world, with a focus on the role played by teachers unions.

Leslie Cornfeld, former special advisor to both the Secretary of Education and to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaks with Paul E. Peterson about chronic absenteeism and how data can be used to identify kids who are at risk.

Paul E. Peterson speaks with Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas about his study finding that students in Milwaukee who received vouchers to attend private schools were 2-5 percentage points less likely to be accused or convicted of crimes than comparable students who attended public schools.

Paul Peterson interviews Robert Shapiro, an expert on public opinion, about how the partisan divide in education policy is shifting, as issues of school quality and accountability have produced “conflicted liberals,” at the same time that the presidential election is creating “conflicted conservatives.”

A report released by the U.S. Department of Education this week finds that 6.5 million students missed at least three weeks of school last year. On this week’s podcast, Bob Balfanz talks with EdNext’s Paul Peterson about the problem of chronic absenteeism.